Luc shook his head. “I wasn’t tired.” He self-corrected. “Well, obviously I was a little tired. Long-ish drive. But I wasn’t tired tired. I finished looking at the resort map and your schedule, and took advantage of having a coupla minutes to recharge.”
Casey laughed. “So you just, what? Sleep because you can?” It sounded both impossible and wonderful.
He nodded, grinning back at her. “It’s called a combat nap. Anywhere, anytime, anyway, anyhow. A few minutes and I’m good to go. It’s one of the many things I learned when I went through BUD/S.”
He was talking about Basic Underwater Demolition slash SEAL training—the ruthlessly brutal months of instruction that every SEAL candidate went through. Dave had trained on his own for years, just to be ready for BUD/S and its grueling phase one.
“Necessity is the mother of invention,” Casey agreed. “Maybe I should try some kind of intense physical challenge—make myself so tired that I have to sleep or, you know, die. Insomnia is not my friend, but it is my constant companion.”
“Yeah, but no,” Luc said. “Yeah, I was exhausted during BUD/S, but, the instructors actually teach us how to... It’s a skill. You breathe and you move your eyes and your tongue a certain way—it sounds nuts, but it works. For me, anyway.”
“Teach me,” she said, but the elevator finally reached the lobby and opened with a ding—revealing around a dozen Wild Sky cosplayers, whose eyes all widened as they saw her. “Later, please?” she asked Luc as she went out to join the crowd. “Hello, my beautiful people! Hey, DeShawn! I didn’t know you were coming, nice to see you! Introduce me to your friends! Who wants a selfie?”
This was madness.
Rio had always considered himself to be a fan of both Casey and the show that had catapulted her to fame, but compared to the teeming crowd of enthusiastic people jammed into this ballroom-sized conference room, he was only mildly interested, at best.
The people gathered here for Casey’s Q&A were intense.
This was her last appearance of the evening—and it was the con’s headlining event for their opening day. Assuming that the chaos from the flooded rooms didn’t steal the spotlight. Nah, this throng wouldn’t flinch at the idea of sleeping on a soggy, sodden mattress. As long as they got to hang with their queen.
It had been like this all day.
Casey had been inundated, nonstop, by endless crowds of adoring fans, all desperately wanting a picture or her autograph or five to ten to fifteen minutes of her time while they told her something Very Important.
When he’d leaned in close and quietly suggested she take a break during a particularly lengthy discourse from a young woman whose dog had recently died, Casey had shut him down with a curt “I’m fine” and a searing look that implied he was both heartless and an idiot. Instead, he’d flagged down one of the con’s volunteers and asked for another coupla cups of coffee.
By that point in the late afternoon, he’d already learned that Casey drank her coffee black.
And now, after a very brief break for dinner, she’d taken the main-stage for this Q&A and was cementing Rio’s other observations about her.
First, she truly respected and cared about her fans. She was also extremely smart and funny and almost ridiculously kind. And she absolutely didn’t believe there was such a thing as a stupid question—well, maybe except for his “Do you need an excuse to extract?” that he’d asked earlier in the day.
Now, as Rio stood to the side and watched, Casey answered even the most extremely basic, easily googleable questions about both herself and her most-famous character, Dana Zannino, with indefatigable charm and ease. She also responded to questions like, “In episode seven, season two, when you’re training Skylar, and it’s raining so hard and you’re on your motorcycle, did you do your own stunts, because in that scene you’re only filmed from the back...” (A: “I did all my own stunts—the production team was really good at making sure we were completely safe, even when it was raining like that. The reason you can only see me from behind in that scene is because Drew—the actor playing Calvin—was on a tear that day, and I kept breaking. You know Drew, he’s just so funny, I couldn’t not laugh. And the one take we got where I kept it together, one of the cast, I’m not naming names, Todd, left their Mickey D’s bag on the set, and the editing team couldn’t crop around it.”)
She’d been just seventeen when she was cast from an open call in southwest Florida where the show was filmed—Rio had learned that tonight. She hadn’t so much as stepped foot in Hollywood—or California, for that matter—until well after season one, when both the show and the ensemble had been nominated for some high-level industry award. They hadn’t won, but the show had gained a reputation for being high quality. Its relatively small but very dedicated base of fans persisted to this day, still trying to get one of the newer streaming services to pick it back up.
There was no news on that front, Casey kept repeating, over and over, with a patience that was admirable.
The only time she faltered—if you could even call it that, it was so miniscule—was when Todd Weston, one of her Wild Sky co-stars, galloped down the aisle and leaped up onto the stage-like platform to join her, right at the end of her appearance. She’d already gone thirty minutes over her scheduled time—with the organizers’ blessing, of course—but now it was time to clear out, to let the hotel prepare the room for the morning’s events. But then there came Todd, with his long, sun-streaked brown hair, bounding up and over to Casey, enveloping her in a hug.
She was surprised to see him—surprised and not entirely happy. Rio saw it in the stiffness of her shoulders as at least a small part of her resisted Todd’s embrace.
Once upon a time, she’d dated him.
That cobwebby fact resuscitated itself in Rio’s rusty Wild Sky memory banks. It was back quite a few years ago, when the show was still running—he’d remembered hearing about it and thinking, Him, really...? And when it hadn’t lasted, he hadn’t been surprised.
But here and now, Todd kept that hug going just a little too long as the crowd cheered his arrival.
“Surprised to see me?” Todd tried to take Casey’s microphone from her, but she stood her ground and didn’t let go, instead angling it slightly so it picked him up.
“Very,” she said.
“Drew had to cancel last minute,” Todd told her, told the crowd who all knew that Drew was one of the other actors from the show. “Scheduling conflict, he sends his apologies—and me. I’m filling in for him.”
“Ah,” Casey said, clearly a little flustered. “That’s... nice of you. But... what a shame. I was looking forward to tomorrow’s panel with him.”
“Yeah, I’ll be there instead,” Todd said.
